Re: NATLANG: Colors

"Mark P. Line" wrote:
>
> David Peterson said:
> > Oh, I just remembered one.   One universal (and I'm pretty sure this is a
> > universal) is that a language will have *at most* 11 *basic* color terms
>
> That's what they say, alright.
From what I recall, they simply said that 11 *seemed to be* the maximum.

At any rate, maximum aside, their theories about the basic colors seems
quite sound, at least up to the 7-color stage.  I would argue that
there's not a large enough sample to argue about color terms above the
7-color level (as far as I know, only the European languages, and
languages in contact with those, have those higher colors, which makes
me doubt how reasonable it is to extrapolate to a universal)